Superfund site of the week: 3 reasons CERCLA cleanups matter to California

KPCC's Molly Peterson on a Gilligan's Island style tour of environmental stories in and affecting Southern California. Named for the Yvor Winters poem: "The slow Pacific swell stirs on the sand/Sleeping to sink away, withdrawing land..."
Follow the blog at @PacificSwell and Molly at @KPCCmolly.

Missing in action last week was our regular Superfund Site of the Week feature. That's because I was missing in action, enjoying a rustic beach-house vacation that involved no Internet. So this week Pacific Swell decided to reset what Superfund is all about. I'm back explaining what it is and giving you three reasons to care in California.

Under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act of 1980, the state with the greatest number of sites under federal Environmental Protection Agency supervision is…New Jersey. 112 sites. (I just haven't got the heart for the obvious joke, maybe because I'm a huge fan of Wiliam Carlos Williams, who proves that the Garden state incubates beauty, too.) But don't worry, Californians! We're third in hazardous wastes. (What up, steel industry!) One behind Pennsylvania, California has 94 Superfund sites to its credit. Sheer volume isn't your big reason to pay attention, though.

Your Public Representatives at work! That contamination that threatens people? Can be cleaned up. CERCLA, in fact, mandates it. Unfortunately for everybody, CERCLA's funding has been spotty, raided for other things in the eighties, its support - a tax - expired 16 years ago. That upped pressure on the PRPs - potentially responsible parties - the companies and entities that left toxic materials behind. Beyond that, the US Supreme Court issued a ruling a few years back in Shell Oil Co. v. United States - a case about a site in Arvin, CA - that limited the reach of the liability the EPA can impose on companies. Potentially responsible parties have traditionally paid for Superfund clean up: after all, they made the mess. But some of the companies that made the mess don't exist anymore, and others have lawyers with a huge appetite for litigation. Over time, the EPA has grown slower on the draw to take companies to court All that adds up to public officials going after chunks of money where they can find them: earmarks, for example, or in stimulus funding. It's an especially fun game to watch in California. Southern California lawmakers are especially concerned about rocket fuel cleanup; we'll talk about that in future posts.